Enhancements in the data difference viewer for Toad for DB2

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Learn about the new enhancements in the data difference viewer for Toad for DB2, Dell Software's solution for optimizing database development and administration.

Hi. This is Jeff Podlasek with Toad DB2 Development. In Toad DB2 version 5.5, we've enhanced our data difference viewer feature. This feature allows you to quickly and easily compare data in similar tables. An example, of the use would be perhaps you have an issue in production, but not in your QA or test environment. So you want to be able to see if you have any differences in data in those two environments.
I've got Toad up and running, and I've connected to a DB2 LUW database. This feature also works for DB2 and z/OS. And I've got a list of tables up. What I'm going to do now is right-click on a table and select Send To. And underneath Send To, we have the Dif Viewer as data option.
So what that does is that opens up the dif viewer document with one table specified. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to select another table. That was a prod table. This is a stage table. And I'm going to right-click on it and say the same thing. Send To dif viewer as data. And that will bring up this dialogue that allows me to specify what columns I want to use as the key comparisons.
So I selected a column and I clicked OK. And then the data div viewer comes up. And we had this feature in previous releases, but it's been really enhanced in this latest release here. A lot of things have changed. For example, you'll see that we now have a toolbar with many different sorting features on it.
For example, if you only wanted to show the rows that were equal, you could click on that. If you wanted to show only the rows that were source only, click on that button. Target only, click on this arrow. The rows that exist in both the source and the target. So these are filtering buttons up on top. I'm going to click this first one here which displays all the data.
And as you click a row on top, you'll see that the bottom control gets updated to reflect the changes that are in the top grid. So here's a row that exists on both the source and the target. And I click on it on top grid, and you'll see that the bottom grid actually highlights the details of the column differences.
There's a couple different views you could have here. You can see this view here lists the columns, the source and target columns right next to each other. So the players' names right next to each other, source and target teams are next to each other. You could use this button here to change that top grid control to have all the source columns here. Then an indicator of how they differ. And then all the target columns on the right hand side of the difference.
And another feature we have here is you could use these arrows to click to the next or previous changes. It's very easy to navigate and see the changes in these grids. And another feature we have is on the bottom, there's two different viewers. A row viewer, which will give you the detailed changes amongst columns. Or a cell viewer. So whatever you've clicked on on top will be displayed on the bottom. And this is handy if you have very large character columns, if you want to display the whole contents of those.
And you could do a lot of other things in this grid as well. Right-click, you could print, export to Excel, format to fit screen. So a lot of different things you could have. Completely revamped. I have a Search option here. If you want to type in a keyword you want to search for, you could do that. And it will take you to the line that is associated with that search criteria.
And just as we did in the past as well, that comparison will work on any results grids. So I've got a script editor open. I'm going to execute it. And you'll see that I will have two result sites. And what you could easily do is right-click, click Compare To, and select what you want to compare to.
And again, it's going to open up this control that allows you to select the keys to be used in comparison. Close the Compare button, and the data dif viewer is displayed as before. We hope you find this new enhanced feature useful. And thank you for using Toad DB2.